I had a fantastic, and quite eventful, weekend of climbing with a group of friends from Oxford. We camped at Tom’s Field, a busy, but quiet camp site just out of Swanage. On Friday night I left a few bits of unopened food in my tent vestibule. Saturday morning I discovered that it had been raided … by a badger! The little bugger dragged off 1kg of muesli, 250gm of crisps, and 200gm of sweets, and I slept through the whole thing!

On Saturday night, I brought all my food into the tent, only to be woken at around 3am by the little arsehole trying to rip a hole in my tent! I slapped it through the tent wall and it ran away, and that was the end of that.

I was really impressed with Boulder Ruckle - a 40 metre high section of cliff at Swanage, with a big rappel in, and climbing (or prussiking back up the rappel line) the only way to get out.

We had a minor epic there on Sunday afternoon - Pete and I went down to climb a classic HVS (which I led, and thought was about grade 19, although it may have just been my recent lack of outdoor climbing, and the atmospheric nature of the climb playing tricks on me). But we’d brought down another mate, James, who was on his first outdoor trip and, despite doing incredibly well, couldn’t get past the crux. So I lowered him down, then Pete climbed up and we headed back to our bags.

Myself and another friend Chris rapped back down to rescue James, who was stranded at the bottom. After skimming the guide book, we decided on a VS 4c - the safest/easiest line back out. I led the first pitch, then brought up James, and … he got stuck again! So Chris and I made the decision to climb out to the top, then one of us would rap back down and teach James how to prussik.

But then Chris got stumped on the second pitch, because I’d mis-read the guide book. I sent him up the wrong corner, which turned out to be a disintegrating pile of choss. I guess I could have taken a shot at the lead, but we decided to take the safer/easier way out, bail on the climb, and prussik up the rap line.

So I rapped off a hex, and then James and I headed back to where we’d rapped down only to find that the rap line had been taken! We were stuck at the bottom of the cliff, with no food or water (south facing and blue skies - it was baking hot), and no easy way out.

At this point my mind was racing with the options we had to extract ourselves from the situation. My best idea was to send James prussiking up our bail line to Chris (who was still on the first belay ledge), and then follow him up, lead out through the choss to the top (I’d still not taken a second look at the guide book) and have James prussik again, up the second pitch. Maybe not the best plan, but what else were we to do?

But James had the spectacularly good idea of heading back to the area we’d rapped down and yelling for a bit. Lo and behold, within a couple of minutes, Pete stuck his head over, figured out what had happened, and dropped our rap line back down (which he’d pulled up, assuming that we were already out and on our way back to the car).

So a few judgement errors on mine and Pete’s part in taking a new climber down Boulder Ruckle, and a good lesson learned - read the guide book carefully! It turns out that the corner we were supposed to climb was just a few metres to the right. And after all this - James’ first outdoor trip, and the closest I’ve ever come to needing to be rescued, he still wants to get into climbing!

Anyway, we got back to Swanage for a lovely sun set and fish and chips so, apart from that damned badger, it was a great weekend all round.